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Stupid Movie Characters

These are some the ridiculously inexplicably stupid characters in movies. These are people who could stupid their way out of having sex with Zeus; people who would be funnier than Jim Carrey if they did what they do on purpose.

Just The Facts

People love movies about stupid people. But it helps when the movie is labeled comedy.

"Idiocracy" is a comedy about stupid people, not a warning for the future. People are actually getting smarter if you put any stock in aggregate IQ tests. Stop getting off on thinking you're better than the generic masses.

That aside, here's a funny list of movies where people not only went to the crap-for-brains store and filled their cars to the ceiling, but then dropped their bags going up the stairs.

4. Jafar in Disney's Aladdin

. Holy cow, what a stupid buttface. Think about it for two minutes, which is more than he ever did:

He's given three wishes by a cosmically powerful genie. He has plotted this for years, with a serious and psychopathic attitude. He knows all the rules and limitations. He knows the world is going to be against him. He knows he wants power more than anything. So he's probably thought very carefully indeed about what he's going to wish, right?

No. His first wish is to "Rule on high, like a sultan!" In practical terms this means "Move the city of Agrabah to a mountaintop, steal the sultan's clothes and say that I am a sultan." The glaring errors of logic here soon become apparent: When he orders his subjects to bow, they refuse, and he's forced to spend his second wish to gain supreme magical power that actually lets him do anything.

See, declaring yourself king of the world does not in fact give you magical powers or the respect of the people you intend to rule that is necessary to rule them. If this had been the twentieth century or later Jafar might have learned from Emperor Norton I of America's example.

Like a typical five year old child, Jafar has evidently spent the many years he's been looking for the genie wishing that he could be in charge and not giving a single thought to what being in charge means, or why he'd want to be in charge, or how it would benefit him to be in charge.

Like any good sorcerer, Jafar wants power. To bend the world with the pure act of willpower. His second wish, to be the world's most powerful sorcerer, is what he should have wished for in the first place. Then he could have spent maybe thousands of years learning and become the master of the universe. And probably on the way he'd have become so enlightened he'd have stopped wanting to hurt people.

But because he's the designated villain of the flick, he has to go right ahead and piss people off in the most pointless way imaginable in order for them to defeat him. Sigh.

3. Cap'n Mal Reynolds in Serenity

He's supposed to be clever and wise. But for all that his loyalty to his crew and his confidence are unbreakable and his sharpshooting and people skills impeccable and that he's ruthless, compassionate and easy on the eyes, he makes one singularly stupid move in the final reel of the ol' big damn movie: Forgetting to shoot the bad guy.

We've seen Mal has no problem shooting who needs to be shot. He's straight up executing at least three people throughout the series and the movie. And this is his nemesis. The nameless Operative, a terrifying - what's a good word for him, he's not a psychopath, because the murders he find acceptable are not in service of himself but of something greater, something he believes in with all his heart. He's conscientious when he murders children, he knows he's a monster, and he's fine with that - okay, "monster" will do. A monster who Mal needs to kill at every cost not just to save himself and his people but to do what be believes, with all his heart, to be right.

And Mal is such a crack shot he simply disarms the guy, leaving him completely at his mercy. This is when you shoot him down and shoot him twice in the head. But Mal doesn't have time for that. He shoots a couple of times in the Operative's general direction, forcing him to take cover, and then turns to climb a precarious array of chains. He knows the Operative is about five meters behind him. He knows he's going to get shot or at best tackled out of the air before he takes two steps. He knows that even if he somehow survives he's going to lose a fuckload more precious time continuing the fight than he would have if he'd taken the three seconds to finish it when he had the chance.

He knows all this and still doesn't shoot. I find this unfathomable. It's not even stupid, it's just blatantly obvious our Joss wrote himself into a corner and couldn't think of a way for the hero and the villain to settle things with good old fisticuffs other than suddenly forgetting that they possess firearms. In one case while he's holding it in his hand.

Yeah, the Operative doesn't get any prizes for going for the tackle instead of picking his gun up from the floor and shooting Mal while he's dangling helpless in the air, either.

2. Mei in House of Flying Daggers

By Thor, Allah and the Buddha, what a bag of carrots passes for her head. Okay, the story is a bit complicated, full of twists and surprising revelations of allegiance, and it takes a few (ten) viewings to figure out that the reason the plot twists come as such a surprise is because they make no fucking sense.

Here's what happens. Leo is the chief of a police district, while (spoilers) secretly a Flying Daggers man. Jin is his lieutenant, and probably the only character without a secret. Mei is one of the Flying Daggers' top agents, posing as their leader's blind daughter, posing as a whore in a brothel in Leo's district. Leo and Mei are lovers, although they have been apart for some time. The brothel's mistress is also with the Flying Daggers guerrilla.

Now, Leo sends Jin to investigate the brothel, unaware that the Flying Daggers lead he has to pretend to follow (because the commissioner is breathing down his neck) is his One True Love, Mei. Jin causes a disturbance, giving Leo an excuse to arrest Mei for public indecency. (Jin tears her clothes a little so yeah, fine, even though they are in a freaking brothel.)

Neither Leo nor Mei gives the slightest hint of recognition as they meet, which could be either because they're terrific spies or because the movie doesn't want to give away their relationship for another 90 minutes, your choice. Leo does however, in a nice display of police corruption, order Mei to dance for him so that she may avoid being arrested, and as we later learn it's a dance with a very intimate meaning to the both of them.

So everything is going nicely and the police force and the brothel are both about to save face and the three Flying Daggers agents in the room are in no danger to expose each other when Mei flips the fuck out and tries to kill Leo with a sword.

There's no reason for her to do this. She doesn't need to impress the Flying Daggers by taking out Leo as a target of opportunity because he's one of them and she knows this and they know she knows. She's not psychically predicting Leo's plan to have her arrested and then broken out by Jin in order for him to infiltrate the organization and going along with it because that's fucking ridiculous and she wouldn't go along with it anyway as neither she nor Leo wants that plan to succeed. She's supposed to hide from the public the fact that she's in an anti-government guerrilla, in a common spy practice called "laying low". She's very good at spy games. (Hey, she's even pretending to be blind.) And she knows from their years of sweet lovin' that Leo's kung fu is better than hers and she can't actually kill him. Oh, and they are totally in love. A love that transcends land, laws, time, distance and (as Jin will painfully find out) brolationships.

Did no one in the production notice this? Were they snared in the twists themselves? Were they so obsessed with making the plot twist that they decided to forego characters in the movie? Did they go we've got pseudo-historical references and kickass fight scenes and heavy duty melodrama, who needs a story with characters that are recognizably human with motivations and feelings and some basic consistency? Did they believe women to be fickle psychopaths ready to lash out at any moment for no reason? All of the above are just as ridiculous and yet just as possible.

1. Jared in Into the Blue

You may have watched the movie once, which may already have been twice more than a body should have to, and it is five years old so you think you don't remember everything. But think about it and you'll find so much of it is burned into your mind forever. And not just that plastic, Barbie doll beauty on display, but Jared. That poor brain damaged diver.

The heroes are under a lot of time pressure to find the sunken heroin for the drug dealers, right. They need to work day and night to find it and not get killed. But Jared makes the decision to spend their precious hours salvaging some little scraps of the immense gold treasures instead. Look, no one is going to find the treasure. No one ever dives there. No one knows it exists but you guys. It's a secret. It can wait half a fart-stinking day while you save your lives. Go ahead and yell at the fictional movie character from the past. It's the only thing that can save you.

And his brilliant plan for when the well-armed drug dealers come to shoot them for failing to find the drugs? Does he try to explain anything? Spin them a tale? Ask for some more time to do this extremely important thing that no one else can do (because no one else knows where to look for the drugs) and save you many millions of dollars instead of killing him and his friends for failing to meet your arbitrary demands? (Yeah the drug dealers aren't that bright either.) No, he starts a fucking firefight. He's vastly outnumbered and surrounded and he DOESN'T HAVE A GUN, and he starts a firefight with the kingpin of the tropic and his armies. If your brain is pouring out of your nose from the sheer pain of remembering these events, brace yourself for the good stuff yet to come.

When Jared's girlfriend, the sexy thing whose name no one can remember, is angry with him for fucking everything up and affects to dump his moronic ass, he could easily salvage the relationship if he told her about the gangsters who are making demands of him and his little group of divers and are in fact directly threatening her life. Not telling people about your acute problems is a typical dumbassed device far too common in Hollwood movies, but Jared is even neglecting to tell Tits McGee about her own acute problems, directly endangering her life in an effort to alienate her and create drama. That may be a new low.

Jared and gang are then being trapped by the gangsters, tied up on a boat because the threat of violence is obviously the only way gangsters ever get anyone to do anything for them. Anyway Jared tells the gangsters about the gigantic sunken treasure that no one in the world knows about at the merest provocation. Keep in mind that the gangsters have no clue whatsoever that there's enough money to change the face of the Earth down there. Jared is giving away everything they could ever have wanted to know, and every single last fucking reason to keep him and his friends, family and anyone he's ever met or heard of alive. In order to buy himself two minutes of not getting punched in the stomach. Seriously, this is the worst boner anyone has ever pulled. Swiftly followed by the gangsters failing to riddle the little gold pots with truly promiscuous amounts of bullets as soon as Jared opened his mouth.If this is a merciful world, by now there is no more pain left and you're feeling good.

Obviously, Jared breaks free and, wait, he dives into the water? In the middle of the sea? With his hands tied behind his back? With his girlfriend and whatstheirface still tied up on the boat? With no means to survive longer than a lungful of air before he has to stick his head up to a boatful of armed gangsters who need to keep him from swimming for help? That's just brilliant. Nothing could top this no- now- wait?

He dives straight for the bags of drugs! And he uses a knife to free his hands and, yeah. He cuts. The bags. And destroys. The drugs. The one thing in the world that could possibly (for liberal values of the word "possibly") have saved his and his friends' lives from these obviously psychotic gangsters who don't care about anything more than getting their drugs back, and you destroy it utterly.

Evidently Jared will stop at nothing to keep drugs off the street. It's actually quite noble. (It would have been just as noble to do it as soon as he found the drugs, mind.) It's just under the circumstances belly button-fuckingly stupid.